The death of 65-year-old Padoh Mahn Sha, the KNU's secretary general, is not only a great loss for the Karen people, but also for the pro-democracy movement in Burma.

Nobody knows yet who committed the assassination. Several dissidents along the Thai-Burmese border claim the killing was ordered by the Burmese junta and that they might target other exiled leaders based in Thailand, especially in Mae Sot. Members of the border-based opposition suggest the KNU general secretary was at the top of a junta hit list.

However, the Thai police have confirmed that an eyewitness stated that Mahn Sha was killed by two gunmen who greeted him in Karen language. Karen sources suspect the gunmen were members of the Democratic Karen Buddhist Army (DKBA), a Karen splinter group that broke with the KNU in 1995 and is now allied with the Burma army.
 
What is indisputable is that Mahn Sha’s death follows a series of attacks, killings and assassination attempts between mainstream KNU members and splinter groups, such as the DKBA and the breakaway Brigade 7, now known as KNU/KNLA Peace Council.   

In August 2007, the body of Lt-Col Kyi Linn, commander of the Karen National Liberation Army (KNLA), was found with a bullet wound to the head in the Haungthayaw River in Kawkareik Township of Karen State. Anonymous sources from the KNU rivals claimed Kyi Linn was shot by his own soldiers under orders from the KNU leadership after he had met secretly with Lt-Col Min Chit Oo of the Burmese Southeast Military Affairs Security department without the KNU leaders’ knowledge.

In 2004 Gen Bo Mya visited Rangoon for peace talks with then Prime Minister Khin Nyunt. The resulting “gentlemen’s agreement” stayed in force until Bo Mya’s death in December 2006. Things steadily went downhill thereafter.

The KNU broke off all communications with the junta in February 2007, when Brig-Gen Htain Maung, the former head of KNU Brigade 7, and some 300 KNU soldiers, defected to the Burmese army.

Tensions peaked after Col Ler Moo, the son-in-law of breakaway leader Htain Maung, was killed in a bomb attack while sleeping at a communications office near the group’s headquarters in December 2007.

Soon after, troops from the KNLA—the military wing of the KNU—attacked a bus on the Myawaddy road carrying DKBA soldiers, killing eight people and injuring six. The sabotage of the bus followed a dry season offensive in which the DKBA reportedly attacked Karen civilians in Brigade 6, apparently at the behest of the Burmese military authorities and their continued policy of using the DKBA to undertake offensives against civilians in Karen State and Pegu Division.

The KNU have been fighting for independence since 1949, one of the world's longest-running guerrilla conflicts. However, if the previous few years’ events are anything to go by, the collective aspirations of the Karen people will surely be no more than a pipe dream.

The assassination of Padoh Mahn Sha is the deepest loss the KNU has suffered since the 1950 killing of Ba U Gyi, a former colonial-era Burmese cabinet minister and then leader of the Karen resistance, who was shot in a Burmese army ambush.

On this occasion, however, the evidence points to the assassination being the result of a divided Karen house.  

Surely the generals in Naypyidaw are smugly laughing to themselves today.